Ariadne Search: A CLI tool to search in Ariadne

30 October 2026 · Ariadne, CLI tool, search, software, repo, github

Fig. 1 - Ariadne asleep at Hypnos's side. Detail of ancient fresco in Pompeii. By Sailko - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116386170

As part of the CAA-UK conference project of the building an Agentic Research Assistant (I will share more details about that in the future), I developed Ariadne Search, a Python CLI tool designed to facilitate searching within the Ariadne catalogue efficiently.

Ariadne Search allows users to quickly query the Ariadne catalogue from the command line, returning the results as JSON. This can be used by human users, to easily access data, but it can be more useful for AI agents that need to programmatically interact with the catalogue for research and analysis purposes.

Here’s one example from my own research. To look for records in England using both “radiocarbon” and “C14”, I can run:

ariadnesearch search "radiocarbon" --expand C14 --country England --size 5

That requests up to five records per term. If both searches find the same record, it appears once, with both terms listed. Each result includes a link to the catalogue entry and the original ARIADNE metadata, so I can inspect the source before deciding whether it belongs in my dataset.

It’s a proof of concept, licensed under MIT. View ariadnesearch-cli on GitHub